


fingers; a capulet's halo

by tigerbox



Category: NCT (Band), Red Velvet (K-pop Band)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-07-16 08:50:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16082669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigerbox/pseuds/tigerbox
Summary: irene and taeyong have history and a spot. irene likes to reminiscence...





	fingers; a capulet's halo

He extends a hand over to her, intending to brush the hair away from the frame of her face but she pushes it back when she feels it, offending it to her side. “Only my boyfriend gets to touch my hair.”

“I could be your boyfriend.”

She gives him a look, like she had solved world hunger before he was born. “No, you couldn’t.”

 

 

 

They are like this whenever they meet: sullen, hollow, poorly timed, a relationship without a relationship due to a myriad of mixed signals, a neverending disconnect of well, nothing.

 

 

 

Irene never thinks she’d be someone to have a spot - a place to go and wallow, woe is me, pity party if you will when life gets tough. But she has one now, in the corner of a hill that oversees the Han river, and is particularly melancholy at dusk - the moments where she runs to think, and overanalyze the earth and its inhabitants.

Technically though, this is his spot. She just steals it.

 

 

 

 

The thing about Taeyong though is he’s ultimately kind. It could be awkward when they run into each other now, occasionally at the - ( _his_ ) spot, but it isn’t. He lets her have it, sits politely several feet away when he makes it up the hill after a morning jog and she’s sitting in his spot like it was hers all along; like she’d been the one to discover it when she was fourteen, a runaway from home, someone who couldn’t deal with the idocrysancies of trainee life, like she’d be the one to introduce it to him years later, holding him by the wrist, blindfolded, sneakers scuffed up from all the little rocks and cracks on the hill bound by nature.

Like she’d been the one who taken his virginity on a measly red blanket she’d stolen from the bedframe of one of her members, too forgetful to plan everything ahead of time even though she was a perfectionist - although, weren’t they both?, like she’d been the one kneading on top of his lap from above, cheeks going flush with adrenaline, interlocking fingers with his longer ones, gently hovering down, whispering behind his ear, “ _Don’t be nervous_.”

Or maybe it was all the other way around, she couldn’t remember. Things were always blurry on the hill with the combination of alcohol and all.

 

 

 

 

Sure enough today, he’s run up the hill, a light bead of sweat pooling around the edge of his sweater’s collar. It’s after sunset, and the remnants of the last orange rays are going down past the river on to the other side of Seoul, so he’s brought a flashlight in one hand and a crate of beer in the other. She doesn’t look surprised to see him, even though they more or less had a tendency to bump into each other during sunrises, not sunsets.

He doesn’t look surprised either. Neither of them would ever admit they check each other’s schedules, memorize their flight patterns outside of the country and when they would return, that sort of relationship kind of thing.

 

Anyway.

 

She says something stupid then, something yearning of nostalgia in afterthought. It’d been the beer he’s offered to her in a kind gesture, tapping the top of the can with one of his long, slender fingers, and then opening the tab on so she could drink it, just the way she likes. She’d taken a few sips, more than he does, although they were both lousy drinkers pretending to be otherwise.

The sun goes down, and she whispers a thank you because her cheeks go crimson, just like in the movies, and then she drinks too much, letting her head fall back in a pool of glory and she remembers it - her head touching the ground the first time he’d made her come, in this very spot, hands extended behind her head, those slim, elongated fingers wrapped around hers, not letting go as she felt the extent of her orgasm, all shaky, that adrenaline from her fingers to her toes until the sensation was over and he’d wrapped the red blanket around her body like some protective cocoon, as if she’d been a moth that had finally blossomed into some wonderful butterfly - or in man terms, a butterfly that had finally given him some pussy.

Later, like a stupid boy, he’d ruin the moment, casually tell her he’d stolen the blanket from Taeil in a hurry to meet her there, much like how she’d now stolen this place from him.

 

 

 

 

“Do you remember the first time we made love?” she says, head still on the ground, quite dreamily in the dark. He hasn’t bothered to turn his flashlight off, but luckily it’s facing the direction of the water, illuminating in the background away from them. It sounds silly, the way she says it - made love - as if it was something more.

“Yeah,” he says, noncommittal. She knows it then, that he’s not drunk enough for this conversation. To reminiscence. He takes a couple of more sips, never able to finish one can, even if he brings over a crate of six. Maybe he’s drunk enough now.

 

 

 

 

 

And this is where the story loops:

_He extends a hand over to her, intending to brush the hair way from the frame of her face but she pushes it back when she feels it, offending it to her side. “Only my boyfriend gets to touch my hair.”_

_“I could be your boyfriend.”_

_She gives him a look, like she had solved world hunger before he was born. “No, you couldn’t.”_

 

 

 

 

 

They stay silent again. Cicadas can be heard in the distance, a constant annoyance otherwise, but in this setting welcome enough to break the tension. Irene sits up, somehow unconsciously a couple of inches closer to him this time. She can feel the dirt crumble in the back of her hair, something she’d regret when she’d get back to the dorm, because she’d always been a little bit of a neat freak.

_So was he._

Neither of them had bothered to bring a blanket this time.

“I’d fuck you again if you let me,” he murmurs, voice raspy. Irene can’t make out the features of his face this way in the dark. She’d imagine there’d be a lump in his throat when he says it, _trying_ to sound uncouth, mean spirited. The shadow of his nose bridge is loosely illuminated by the flashlight and she makes the intention to scoot closer.

It feels like years have passed by.

 

 

 

 

“I hate how old you make me feel,” she says. It’s not like she has a bunch of wrinkles. She’s only twenty-nine and some days old now. She has her whole life ahead of her, you know.

But still, she’s got four years and counting on Taeyong, because at twenty-five he’s totally the appropriate age to have that contemplating, youth seeking, quarter-life crisis full of existentialism. Not her.

“You’re not that old.” _THAT._ That. That. That. Irene resists the urge to reach over and punch him. His urge? Reach over and comb a romantic hand through her hair. Her urge? Punch him for calling him old.

She does punch him. Just a little one though, weak fist caught along his bony chest. He giggles like a child when she does it.

Sometimes, it’s like this. Completely different wavelengths.

 

 

 

 

 

Still, she moons over him, wishing they had met in the sunrise instead, so she could see his face, ask him again, curious - the story of how he had gotten that scar below his eye. He would always tell her the story so gently, how he’d been a kid with little life objective and scratching himself when he was stressed seemed like the simple option.

 

Bad habits go deep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Can I touch it?” she asks, somewhere in the dark, spine unfolding off the grass.

He doesn't answer, presumably staring out into the abyss again, wondering if they accidentally stumbled over the hill in their drunken stupor how long it’d be until someone would find their idol-ed dead bodies, write a stricken headline in the news about a comatose Juliet and suicidal Romeo - the Montagues and Capulets of SM Entertainment. He thinks about saying this out loud to her but doesn’t, and he doesn’t flinch when she does reach over aiming for his scar, her soft skin tracing the edges of the callousness gingerly and with tenderness, so girlfriend-like.

She’s having another moment; rewound in the past to ten minutes ago his casual words in repetitive play as she keeps her hand still, on his scar: _I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me._

She doesn’t bring it up again out loud, though.

 

 

 

 

“I think you just need your EAT, PRAY, LOVE, moment, noona,” he contextualizes. He does this to her in rarity, tries to piece together and problem solve her life in a way she couldn’t. The way he says “ _noona_ ” makes her tingle inside, and she doesn’t like it. “You just need to get away a bit, travel the world, and find yourself away from the madness of Seoul and all the bad things with it.”

“Yeah,” she says a bit sadly. Maybe she was over everything here, it’s possibly true. But she couldn’t just imagine giving it up. “Would you go with me?”

He doesn’t give her an answer. She stops tracing the scar on his face with her finger, leaving it there dangling in mid-air, waiting for something. Like a prayer, he takes her fingers into his, until they’re holding hands, elbows outstretched into the night sky, extended upward. Irene doesn’t know what this is supposed to mean.

She kind of wishes he would just hold it for real, the way a boyfriend would.

 

 

 

 

 

She imagines it then, the familiar feel of those long fingers again, inside her, expanding within, contracting themselves and pushing upwards with a rough urgency, the way he’d done it on Christmas Eve two years ago when they could only meet for twenty minutes between schedules and she’d let him do it to her, in an unconventional hotel room type of indiscretion.

They’d always had an unspoken rule, to only hook up on the hillside.

But the holiday season had unspun her off her kilter that year, made her loose and forget her morals. She vaguely remembers, searching through the numbers in her contacts, desperate to find his the second she had taken her heels off in her room after a SM Town concert in a country whose name she could never quite remember how to spell.

“Merry Christmas,” she had texted, followed by her room number. Eggnog always made her so horny for him, specifically.

It’d been good though, she remembered - the way he’d made her wet so quickly, the way Taeyong hadn’t broken eye contact with her when he had retrieved his hand out of her with an intimidating confidence, sucking his own fingers with her all over them.

 

 

 

 

Up here, in the present, he’s retracted a bit. He’s more innocent, more like the prepubescent trainee who couldn’t make eye contact with her if he tried. In some ways, he’ll always be that to her, just some dime a dozen kid from the past - something she passed in the hallway that constantly yearned for something more proprietary for his own future.

Success.

 

 

 

 

He lets go of her hand that’s stuck in mid air, and she’s suddenly cold. He’s wearing an oversized black hoodie as usual, and she wants to ask him if she can wear it, but she hesitates, unsure if he’d give it to her.

“This is gonna be the last time for a while you’ll see me,” he warns. “I kind of have a girlfriend now.”

“Oh, yeah. That.” she rolls her eyes in the dark. It’d been all over the news, the building, and Yeri wouldn’t stop chattering about in the dormitory. How some freshly debuted idol with rosy cheeks and a pure smile had a big stinking crush on Taeyong, the alluring and smoldering bad boy rapper from SM and they were getting to know each other - also known as We Got Married. A show full of fabrication and lies, meant to deter the general public away from the real relationships at bay.

Something like that.

“And schedules too,” he finishes up. World tour. Globetrotter. Jet setter. She’d been there before too. She rolls her eyes again.

 

 

 

She can hear a beer can suffocating, wrinkling into aluminum with nothing inside. Taeyong must have finished the one he’d been slowly sipping on. Uncharacteristic for him to actually finish one. Maybe she should finish hers too, so they could be on the same page.

He makes the motion to get up.

“Wait,” she says, head rushing again from drinking the rest too fast. She thinks of it then, the pile of clothes she’d left on her bed, excited to do the laundry, and iron, then fold - her initial plan on a rare day off. Not this.

In the past, they’d talked about it. What it’d be like if they moved in together, took turns cleaning, cooking, ironing, churning out laundry. Be domestic.

Isn’t that how they fell into this? Her, backstage somewhere, folding all of the Dreamies clothes into neat piles randomly out of boredom, just stumbling by. Him, intrigued, timidly suggesting the way he does it at the dorm one sleeve over the other first - comparing cleaning notes like two nerds, Haechan, Yeri, overhearing and giggling because these were their natural born fucking ( _also soon-to-be-fucking_ ) leaders.

His confession, years later, that he always thought that’d she’d been pretty when they were trainees, just like every other male trainee and idol in a fifty mile radius.

Her, buying him an ironic bucket of Febreze on the anniversary of his three year debut, also coincidentally, the day she wore the wrong pairs of sneakers to come up here, having no idea he was going to kidnap her and take her to his “spot.”

Like a boyfriend would do - not just some random “ _hoobae-nim_.” but whatever, semantics. They never could quite pinpoint any of the relationship shit down anyway.

 

 

 

She reaches over, accidentally stumbles her hand on his ankle, then latches on to it. He crouches down so they’re at the same level again, but he has no intention of really sitting back down.

“Taeyong,” she mumbles, really pitiful, “Can’t you just hug me like you used to when we’d sit up here. In our spot?”

She can hear him sighing, hesitating. Then he does it, reaching over. Long fingers caught in her hair, chest warm and tight against hers. It’s lovely and she doesn’t want to let go, hugging him back, rampant, electric, arms around his waist, feeling his skinny ribs underneath his sweatshirt. She can feel him caving in, wonders if he feels everything from their past in the hug too. But then it’s over, and she’s cold again, and those fingers aren’t pressing into her the sides of her neck anymore.

“Kiss me Taeyong.” she says, brazenly, reaching for those fingers just once more, unable to let his previous invitation unloop in her head - _I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me. I’d fuck you again if you let me._

His fingers have retracted however, far in the distance.

“Kisses are for girlfriends, noona. Which you made clear a thousand times, I get it - you’re not, we’re not.” He gets up for real then, taking the empty cans with him, the flashlight off, now illuminating nothing in the background, the bridge of his nose completely disappeared from her eyesight.

 

 

“Besides, this is your spot now.”

 

 

 

She waits a while before coming up again, the next Christmas Eve. It’s not like she expects him to be up there, more or less she just wants to reminiscence a little. It doesn’t surprise her that he’s not waiting for her with a red blanket and an open smile, like hey, forgive me? Instead, there’s a couple, kissing sweetly, all cozied up at the edge of the hill, sharing one sweater like it’s made for them. A real relationship.

There’s an empty beer can littered by the edge of where they - Irene and Taeyong - used to sit together, and talk about their futures, before getting nostalgic; always a battle between the two. She sighs and leaves, watching the couple for some time.

She doesn’t bother to pick the beer can up.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the memories, Montague.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> am i the only one who ships this okay maybe i am but idc my pretty leaders ;;


End file.
